I've been thinking about death lately. Maybe because I've been managing a lot of injury and financial difficulty. Maybe because I'm coming up to 58 at the end of the year (specialists have told me my cerebral palsy — brain paralysis at birth — means I use ten times as energy than usual, which makes me 580 years old). Or both. Or more.

But, there’s a quiet symmetry in the way time holds us. From the moment we’re born, we begin to move — slowly, steadily — away from that beginning and toward our end. Each year adds layers: memory, meaning, perhaps even wisdom. But beneath that accumulation lies a deeper truth — that with every breath, we drift further from birth and closer to death.

This isn’t a morbid thought, though it could be mistaken for one. Rather, I see it as a reckoning — with time, with mortality, and with the realisation that life is pardoxical - strength1ening and experiential, finite and fragile.

For some, ageing is experienced as becoming. We gain confidence, self-awareness, autonomy. Death, in early years, feels abstract — something for the distant future. But as time folds, the sense of proximity grows. Our awareness shifts. We start counting not how many years we've lived, but how many we might have left.

Yet this journey — from birth to death — is not navigated equally. For many, it’s interrupted. Accident, illness, suicide, or violence can end a life mid-sentence. And often, those endings are patterned, not random.

Who we are — our gender, race, sexuality, class, disability — shapes not just how we live, but how long we live. A queer teen, bullied into silence. A Black man, targeted by systems. A disabled woman, dismissed in the healthcare system. A child born into poverty, inheriting exhaustion instead of opportunity. These are not anomalies — they are symptoms of a structure that often fails more than others.

And it’s not just about premature death. It’s about the conditions that make living unbearable. Our systems — social, economic, medical, judicial — often fail to offer what is needed to survive, let alone thrive. When people die by suicide, we mourn them, but rarely do we name the systems they couldn’t survive. When people are lost to addiction, illness, or violence, we pathologise them, but we don’t always confront the world that broke them.

So this is not just a reflection on time. It’s a call to notice the inequities baked into it — and to become aware of the dysfunction that makes life unendurable for some. We must recognise that many people don’t simply die; they leave because they were given no real place to live. No safety. No belonging. No mercy. In the end, escape was the most coherent response to incoherent systems.

This isn’t about individual tragedy — it’s about collective responsibility.

And yet, even in the face of all this, there is something sacred. Fragility breeds awareness. Awareness breeds presence. For those who have touched the edges of death — whether in grief, in protest, or in survival — life may be something to take more lightly. Time may become sacred. We may begin to cherish not just milestones, but small mercies: kindness, connection, breath.

So no, this isn’t simply a poetic musing on life and death. It’s a reckoning. A bow to the length, brevity, fragility, and inequality of the path between birth and death. And maybe, an invitation to walk it with more clarity — and to help dismantle the conditions that force people to exit it too soon.

None of us chose when we were born. Few of us choose how we die. But we do have some say in how we move through the space in between — and how we shape that space for others.